Africa strives to get online: a combination of poor infrastructure, high access costs and lack of incentives for foreign investment is holding back internet growth in Africa

Telecommunications International, April, 2004 by Sarah Parkes

The internet. For most of us it's a basic utility, as pervasive, reliable and instantaneous as turning on a tap or switching on a light. Not so, however, for hundreds of millions of Africans for whom the Digital Divide is already wider than the Rift Valley, and growing rapidly.

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High access costs, chronic lack of infrastructure, poorly coordinated ICT policies and obstructive regulation are conspiring to keep the internet out of reach of 99 per cent of the continent's population.

Sadly, behind the hope and hype that have characterised African ICT development conferences from Dakar to Dar es Salaam, nowhere near enough is being done at a political level to create the conditions needed to foster external investment and local entrepreneurship. That's going to have to change if the continent is ever going to power itself out of its internet blackout.

A new summit brings hope

To date, protectionist policies designed to shield inefficient incumbent operators, high import duties on IT equipment, archaic licensing provisions, and a fragmented approach to ICT development have been some of the most important stumbling blocks to development.

Addressing those key policy issues was one of the principal goals of the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS), a top-level three-day conference in Geneva last December aimed at building broad political consensus on an effective, achievable way out of the digital darkness.

Attracting 44 heads of state and 11,000 participants from NGOs, private enterprise and national authorities, the event surprised some cynics by generating a number of promising outcomes, including the establishment of a global Digital Solidarity Fund, a range of new public-private partnerships involving prominent industry players like Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, and a multi-pronged Action Plan designed to simultaneously tackle the main trouble spots.

WSIS Action Plan priorities include encouraging governments to actively develop and implement e-strategies and pro-investment policies, the establishment of public internet access resources like web-enabled community telecentres, the integration of ICT training into education programmes at school and teacher training level, and the promotion of government-backed content development schemes to deliver relevant applications in local languages or, for communities where literacy is low, graphically-based formats.

"Telephones will not feed the poor, and computers will not replace textbooks. But ICTs can be used effectively as part of the toolbox for addressing global problems," ITU Secretary-General, Yoshio Utsumi, said at the opening of the conference. To that end, the Action Plan has set an ambitious target of connecting all villages, schools, hospitals and governments by 2015.

Serious problem

Simply enumerating priority areas is not, however, to deny the huge scope of the problems facing Africa.

Chronically poor or non-existent fixed infrastructure is one of the most critical. While the PSTN remains virtually the sole conduit for the internet continent-wide, the 49 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa together share just 0.2 per cent of the world's phone lines. For rural communities, which in some countries account for up to 90 per cent of the population, the nearest fixed phone can be many hours' walk away.

"Lack of basic infrastructure is undoubtedly the most important economic issue holding back growth," says international analyst Paul Budde. "Private investment is beginning to spur plans for faster growth, with some countries targeting as much as 20 per cent per annum. But for the moment huge unmet demand remains the rule, and growth is inching forward at best."

What's more, when it comes to the internet, accessible, affordable phone service is only half the equation. For the moment, however, PC ownership remains a distant dream for all but a wealthy few. ITU estimates put the total number of PCs in Africa at around 7.5 million, or one for every hundred people. But with many of these sequestered away in large multinationals and NGOs, real penetration figures look much lower--as few as one machine per 500 people, according to IDRC Knowledge Consultant, Mike Jenson. Lack of local manufacturing capability and tax regimes that still treat computers as luxury items exacerbate the problem.

Bandwidth squeeze

Africa's chronic bandwidth shortage creates another impasse. While available bandwidth more than doubled between 2001 and 2002 to 1.5Gbps, growth is laggardly by global standards, with a world average increase of 174 per cent over the same period and a Latin American growth rate of 479 per cent.

The launch of government-backed international connectivity provider Nile-Online saw Egypt overtake South Africa in 2002 as the nation with the most international bandwidth (550Mbps compared with 380Mbps). But across the rest of the continent, links of 10Mbps or less are the rule--Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Comoros and Sao Tome & Principe are connected via 256Kbps links (less than the average SME in the UK).